Day Five!

 The day dawned blue, still and warm, spoilt only by the cooing of those awful pigeons in the beech tree; being generous, I guess they are grieving their failure to incubate the eggs they have brooded in past weeks, the nest now deserted and slowly disintegrating when the wind blows.

Tuesday, being Day five, I wondered what the day held in store; the grace, good manners, refinement and elegance promised in the nursery rhyme, or something unconnected with the myths of the past. Thank the Lord it's not woeful Wednesday, I conjectured. But Day five. has other connotations; it's the day we are or were released from Covid isolation after infection just a few months ago. It's the title of the apocalyptic series on US television which I never really took to. Day five is the last day of a red-ball test match, and what a game and day it was against the Kiwis last week!

For me Day five is different; I now know what to expect. The steroids of the first three days of each cycle having faded, I'm left with that orange poison coursing through my body, I guess but don't really know whether it's the circulation of blood that takes this poison through atria, ventricles, arteries, lungs, veins and out to that orange-sized tumour hidden somewhere below my waist. I can't see it or feel it but it lurks, desperate to spread its evil to liver and any other organ it takes a fancy to!  The consultant advised that it was "stage three" ....... "and three-quarters" as an afterthought! Just in time, and it's not spread, yet!

This is why I love and hate those orange tablets, relentlessly, day by day, morning and evening, twelve hours apart, scuttled down after the savoury course and then iced like a cake usually with a banana, something to sandwich them in my stomach, to compress them and reduce my awareness of their presence!

Day five, the day I spend exhausted in bed, sweating without end, mind detached from body, disorientated, detached from reality, seeking refuge in a sleep that never really arrives, but today, day six, gives me hope that again the worst may have passed as I write this post almost effortlessly. Of physical energy, I may have little, but at least my brain has reconnected and there is some logic again to life.